Women Survivors, Psychological Trauma, and the Politics of Resistance

ISBN-13: 9780789008909 / Angielski / Twarda / 2000 / 232 str.

Norma Jean Profitt

Opis

Understand how women survivors of abuse have become empowered to work for social change and help others

This one-of-a-kind book explores the processes through which women survivors of abuse can transform psychological trauma into a politics of resistance and become involved in collective action for social change. Women Survivors, Psychological Trauma, and the Politics of Resistance uses the powerful testimony of survivors to reveal the processes, factors, insights, and conditions that prompted these women to join in the collective struggle opposing violence against women and children.

Unlike other books that only examine the empowerment strategies that women employ to leave abusive relationships, this essential book is a unique, in-depth exploration of the social and psychological processes of survivors'empowerment. This book traces how these processes unfold, showing how women have made sense of their lives and became involved in action for social change.

In this unique book, you will discover:

• how the transition house movement came about and how its practices were conceived and shaped
• how women survivors have learned to recognize "invisible" conflicts and contradictions in their lives
• new directions for feminist social work research
• the barriers that stand in the way of building communities dedicated to healing, action, and change
• how the involvement of survivors themselves can help to recreate shelters and women's organizations as settings for the collective struggle against violence
• which currently used remedies for woman/child abuse need to be reexamined . . . and much more
  
  Containing qualitative studies of eleven women, analysis of their abusive experiences, and suggestions for new social work models to help survivors of abuse, Women Survivors, Psychological Trauma, and the Politics of Resistance will assist you in developing improved techniques from a feminist social work perspective to provide help to abused women.

Spis treści

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Introduction
• A Retrospective
• Contextual Framework
• Situating This Study
• Focus and Methodology of Study
• Organization of the Book
• Chapter 2. Shaping the Practices of the Transition House Movement: From a Discourse of Agency Toward a Discourse of Self-Esteem
• Brief Overview of the Battered Women's Movement
• The Struggle Over Definition of the Needs of Battered Women
• The Professionalization and Repoliticization of Shelters
• Dominant Discourse and the Positioning of Abused Women As Clients
• Chapter 3. June's Story
• Chapter 4. Rewriting a Survivor's Life: Revisiting the Past to Form the Future
• Chapter 5. “Rediscovering What These Bones Are About, What This Flesh Is About”
• Shifting the Grounds of Consciousness: Naming and Challenging Hegemonic Constructions of Violence Against Women
• The Process of Making Sense: Recognizing Contradiction and Conflict and Making Conscious the Invisible and the Unconscious
• Tensions, Transgressions, and Threats: Pain and Promise
• Liberatory Discourses and Spaces: Self-Recovery, Social Analysis, and Collective Action
• Changes in Subjectivity: Self-Acceptance and Shifting Structures of Identity
• Women's Collective Action: Knowledge, Consciousness, and Transformations of Identity
• Chapter 6. Finding the Self in Other: Reflections on a Researcher's Life
• Reflexivity in Feminist Research
• My Journey Through the Research Process
• Confrontation with the Unnamed and Reflections on the Self
• Critical Analysis of the Process of Uncovering the Repressed
• Directions for Feminist Social Work Research
• Chapter 7. Silences, Gaps, and Absences: Understanding How Differences Matter
• Spaces for Collective Analysis of Experience and Opportunities for Collective Action
• Political and Ethical Commitments and Healing
• Barriers to Building Communities of Healing, Action, and Change
• Constructing Avenues of Action for Survivors
• Class Relations
• Conceptualizations of and Attitudes Toward Survivors
• Investments in Identities As Workers/Feminists/Professionals
• Work Structures and Processes
• Future Directions and Challenges
• Chapter 8. Implications and Directions for Feminist Social Work Practice
• Reradicalizing Our Movement and Our Work with Survivors
• Reenvisioning Our Movement and Working Together Across Differences
• The Many Voices of Survivors: Speaking About Our Lives
• Turning the Gaze on Ourselves As Workers, Feminists, Survivors, and Professionals in the Movement
• Appendix: Participants in This Study
• June
• Paola
• Donna
• Jackie
• Ruth
• Victoria
• Barbara
• Heather
• Rosario
• Maryanne
• Eleanor
• Notes
• References
• Index

O autorze

Norma Jean Profitt,